The deeply flawed magnificence of Clair Obscur
Video:
I have just completed Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, and I have a lot to say about it, both the good and the bad. The game is incredibly hard to review without spoiling anything, but I will try my best. For the purposes of this post, we will establish two terms: "the main game", which is however many chapters or acts, and "the final act", which is the very last bit. This is going to help us navigate my spoiler-free impressions. When I say 'spoiler-free', I mean the plot. Some of the game's structure I will spoil because that's the main point of this post.
Expedition 33 had a lot of positive press coverage and became an instant hit upon release. I always try to temper my expectations when it happens, but after seeing the trailer it was really hard to contain my excitement.
The game tells the story of a world that is slowly being erased by the mysterious Paintress. Every year ever since the Fracture, a catastrophe that split the Continent and isolated the city of Lumiere on a distant island, she paints a number on the Monolith, counting down from 100, and all people who have reached this age disappear into a whirlwind of red and white flower petals. This is called "the Gommage". Countless Expeditions have been launched from Lumiere in order to cross the sea, travel to the Monolith and defeat the Paintress, but none have yet succeeded. And none have returned.
Your party of heroes are Expedition 33. There is Lune, an ambitious scientist with an affinity to Chroma, which is basically magic in this world. She is logical, composed, incredibly smart and just a badass character all around. Then we have Gustave, a kind-hearted engineer and inventor with a prosthetic arm who has just lost someone very dear to him in the last Gommage. And finally, there is Maelle, a 16 year old fencer prodigy who decided to join the Expedition because she never felt like she belonged in Lumiere anyway. Maelle is an orphan, she bounced around foster families until they gommaged, then bounced around again until she landed in the care of Gustave and his sister Emma. They are her legal guardians, which makes the bond Maelle and Gustave share so very special.
I was really impressed by how quickly and efficiently Clair Obscur establishes the rules of the world and the setting just through the Prologue alone, which about 30-40 minutes of gameplay. The dialogues, the interactions, and the cutscenes all reinforce each other and make the introduction really smooth. I was absolutely captivated by the uniqueness of the world and the rules it lives by, including the gradual changes in society caused by the Paintress and the yearly Gommage that she triggers. For example, Maelle thinks that Gustave is ancient, even though he is only 32. But the thing is, there is no one older than 32, so this is the current max age.
I also loved the fatalism permeating the whole idea of Expeditions. The purpose is to get to the Monolith and defeat the Paintress, but those who go on this perilous mission, especially after so many failures of their predecessors, also fully realize the second objective: pave way for those who come after, because the chances of success are elusively small. In your team, it's Lune who is aware of this at any given moment: she keeps the journal of your Expedition in painstaking detail for the future Expedition 32, should yours fail.
Overall, the journals from the past Expeditions that you find in the wild — both within the areas and on the overworld map — do the heavy lifting in terms of expanding the setting and filling it with details. From these journals you learn what the previous Expeditions tried, what their theories and observations were, but most often — how they perished. Yes, most of the journals are tragic, but some of them are hilarious too and do lighten the mood. All grappling or climbing points you use for traversal were set up by the previous Expeditions, which emphasizes the heritable nature of this ordeal. Children inherit this purpose from their parents, younger siblings from older siblings. They set up camps, platforms and leave notes knowing full well that their friends or family members will make use of them in some way next year.
I quite enjoyed the mystery, but the story of Clair Obscur changes course significantly throughout the game, and later on it morphs into a type of story that I am personally not a fan of. It happens: there are types of stories we like — might be about a found family, or antagonist-turned-protagonist, or the world is ruled by an AI we need to dismantle; and types of stories we don't like — it was all a dream, or the world is beyond salvation, or you are not who you think you are. For me, the story of Clair Obscur turned from something unique and exciting that I have not played before, to the framing that I like the least. However, this is not at all the major problem I have with the game's story; to be honest, I was surprised — not to say bewildered — that the game as story-heavy as Clair Obscur would have this particular issue with its plot. This is a major spoiler though, so I will add a spoiler section to this post in the coming weeks. Moving on...
The combat system is a curious mix of turn-based and real-time: when it's your turn, you have no time limit and can think through the skills or items you are going to use. Then, when it's you enemy's turn, you need to get ready for dodging or parrying. Dodges are generally easier to nail than parries, so it's a good idea to start with those when fighting an unfamiliar enemy. Parries have a much tighter window, and if you miss it — you eat all the damage. A successful parry will give you an action point for your next turn, and if you successfully parry all hits of a combo, you can land a powerful counterattack. I have loved parrying mechanics when done right ever since I played Sekiro so for me it was a selling point; I know that for many it was a major downside. While parries work well overall, for how tight the parry window is, the responsiveness of controls leaves a lot to be desired. Sometimes I would press parry, and it wasn't that I missed the timing, but my character just won't move at all, which posed some challenges during more difficult fights. Another unpleasant fact is that in earlier chapters the enemy attacks are well-telegraphed but in late-game become much less so, leaning heavily towards the Elden Ring-style pauses that make it annoying to learn a pattern. However, the major downside of the parrying system that I found is that your successful use of it heavily outweighs your builds towards the late game. After a point, it becomes fairly meaningless what builds your characters have, as long as you parry successfully. With many bosses and more difficult enemy encounters, if you can't parry your whole party will just be wiped and it doesn't matter at all if you have the most damage-heavy build possible. You don't really have a choice of whether or not you want to engage with the parry mechanic — you have to, as the game goes on. Of course, you can also just dodge, it's safer, but the price of additional AP you get from successful parries also goes up as you progress.
The one part of the combat system that quickly becomes unnecessary is the QTEs. Every skill that you use has its own QTE pattern that you need to press in order for the skill to land. You can also do a perfect QTE to get maximum damage. While quite entertaining at first, it quickly becomes an unpleasant routine: if you use a skill quite often, the QTE is well-known to you, and it loses all impact because it's the same every time. The only thing it's doing is getting in the way of you enjoying the beautiful animations of your characters performing badass moves, and that's it. You can enable automatic QTEs in the settings, but as far as I know, the game will just pass QTEs without landing them perfectly, so I am not sure it's all that helpful.
Clair Obscur's build system relies on Pictos and Lumina: Pictos are little trinkets you get as a reward or find in the wild, that modify the way you fight. For example, there is an Augmented Counter Pictos that increases your counterattack damage, or a Burning Mark Pictos that applies Burn when you attack an enemy that is Marked. There are dozens of Pictos, and if you equip one and win 4 battles, it will become a Lumina. Lumina can be equipped on anyone without restriction as long as the character has enough Lumina Points. For example, you find an Anti-Burn Pictos, equip it on someone, win 4 fights, and now you can equip the Anti-burn on everyone in your party. Moreover, the Pictos themselves provide stats, while the corresponding Lumina provides only the effect, so it requires some thinking and balancing when constructing a build. Pretty cool, huh? The only downside to this system is that when you have dozens upon dozens of Pictos and Lumina, the management process becomes really clunky and unwieldy as sometimes you have to unequip everything and just build from the ground up. You have a 'mark as favorite' button which really helps but otherwise it took me a lot of time to shuffle them around.
When it comes to individual mechanics, Clair Obscur is quite a lot of fun; each character follows the same pattern of 'your whole mechanic is based on this 1 thing you need to manage'. Maelle has stances: some skills switch her to a specific stance, others require a certain stance to be more effective, cost less or give more benefits. Gustave has Overcharge on his prosthetic arm and needs to earn charges through various means to be able to deliver a devastating attack. Lune has Elemental Stains that she earns through using skills of different elements: some skills become stronger when they consume specific stains or might have an additional effect, so the order of her casts is important.
Moving towards another aspect of the game I loved wholeheartedly: the music. The music is absolutely fantastic. I hope Lorian Testard and Alice Duport-Percier win absolutely everything because they deserve it. Some of the boss themes just made my jaw drop. The songs in Clair Obscur are also a part of the plot, and I always love it when the soundtrack of a game is story-significant. Chef's kiss, just exceptional. Also, while we are on the topic of sound, I highly recommend playing the game with French dub, it's incredible!
While the level architecture, especially when it comes to the optional areas, is quite unimpressive, the art direction slays every single time. The world of Clair Obscur looks gorgeous, and every time you set foot in a new place, you're going to be blown away by how stunning — and different — it looks. The same goes for boss and creature design and all the animations, especially your characters' attacks and counterattacks. When it comes to art, be it visuals, music, or cutscenes, Expedition 33 is nothing but excellence...
... however, it's also a game.
The main problems of Clair Obscur are pacing that deteriorates very quickly after a certain point, and its open world structure that does far more harm than good. These issues are intertwined, as one would expect, and they prevented me from enjoying the game as much as I wanted.
Sandfall Interactive clearly know how to deliver a perfect curated experience and balance it well. From the very first chapter and until the start of the last act, you follow the main questline because you have nothing else to do. Not all means of travel are available to you, so most of the open world is unreachable; most areas that are nearby glow red letting you know that your level is way too low to venture there. The story pulls you forward, and the path is quite linear. Sure, you can stray a little bit to the side and collect a Lumina point or an Expedition journal in the overworld, or try to complete a platforming puzzle — I personally didn't like them because while the movement in Clair Obscur is suitable for traversal, it's too clunky for platforming — but otherwise you go straight from one main quest to the next. It's all rather smooth: the encounters are well-balanced because your path is linear and it's easy to predict what level you will likely be by any point of the journey; the pacing itself is good, with fights, dialogues and story-related cutscenes intertwining comfortably.
As you reach the end of the main game, the pacing starts falling apart as the last stretch is just dozens of fights back to back to back with no respite in between. The game starts digesting itself as you move through the areas you've already been to and overcome endless fights with the enemies you have already fought. Since I played Clair Obscur in a very short span of time, for me it was like replaying yesterday and the day before yesterday again for no reason at all. This stretch is made much worse by the fact that your damage is capped to 9999 points per hit, and you reach this threshold way earlier than this string of fights. At one point I just stopped caring what weapons and Pictos I found because I already did max damage and there was no point in changing anything.
The damage cap drags the fights on even more, as you try to wade through the sea of enemies you've already fought to the main quest. Skipping the fights is possible, but as with any JRPG, it also bears the risk of you ending up underleveled and having to go back and grind for experience anyway.
In the last act you get your one final quest, your final boss encounter, and that's it. You're free to go immediately to the finale if you so desire. Simultaneously, the final means of travel becomes available to you, and you're finally, at last, free to explore the open world.
I don't know about you — let me know in the comments if you play videogames differently — but when I get my final 'Go defeat Ganondorf quest', I make sure that I've done everything that is of interest to me, before I go. I explore every nook and cranny of the map, upgrade weapons and equipment, do all side quests including, without fail, the quests of my companions, gather collectables, if it's fun, complete challenges and so on and so forth. And only then, when there is no more game to play, I go to the final showdown with the boss, watch the credits roll and close the game. It's done.
In the last act I was really excited to finally explore the open world. The stupid damage cap that served no purpose other than to make half the game twice as long, disappeared, and I was prepared to overhaul all my builds and Pictos and start dealing insane damage.
Except I couldn't. Wherever I went, enemies had millions of HP and just killed me in one hit. For hours I was stumbling about trying to find where I am supposed to start my free exploration from, being annoyed out of my MIND for absolutely no other reason than the game letting go of my hand and having no navigation or pacing tools I could use by myself. Your party members have levels indicated by a number: level 33, level 42; but for some reason enemies — or areas — are not marked at all, so when you pick a fight with someone, you have no idea if they are 20 levels above you or below you. This was kind of the breaking point for me when I seriously thought about just abandoning the game and moving on. The companions gave me a couple of pointers for their personal quests, but not all of those were balanced to my level, and for some I had to return later.
Desperately, I was trying to find the starting thread of this knotted ball of yarn, an encounter balanced to my current level so I could start building strength, but I failed repeatedly. I am not a player who will try to overcome a much stronger foe by trying again and again dozens of times. Somehow, little by little, I was able to crawl up the level ladder and finally gain access to most of the encounters in the optional areas of the overworld. But it was a miserable stretch of gameplay.
This period was made worse by the fact that the game has absolutely nothing for you to do in the last chapter except just fighting for experience and loot. If you talked to your companions consistently during the main game, as I did, they have one or two dialogues left for the final chapter, and then they loop forever. There is absolutely nothing to do in camp. Companion quests are tiny and mostly fetch type; it is very clear how the companions are graded based on their importance to the main story, as the most important one gets an entire explorable area as a personal quest, others have barely a room with a fight, and some don't even get any quests at all. So, the 15-20 hours of gameplay in the last act before the final boss, if you're willing to explore the open world, are largely silence and just fighting.
Here I also need to mention that, similarly to companions, areas and their complexity also deteriorate dramatically depending on whether or not they are story-relevant. In the overworld you may see a lot of areas you can go to, but many of them are just decor, consisting of one small space with a piece of loot or a record for your record player. The number of explorable optional areas is pretty small.
The open world structure severely undermines already suffering pacing because there's just not enough content to comfortably fill it. I was comparing Expedition 33 to Metaphor: ReFantazio, another JRPG I played fairly recently, and also BoTW and ToTK, to try and understand what Clair Obscur is missing. Metaphor is not an open-world game; it's an open area, where the main quest takes you from one big area to another, and in each you have a few optional places to explore. It still allows you some freedom, while remaining a largely curated experience. Metaphor also has a million other things for you to do apart from fighting: you can work on your relationships with companions, you can hang out with townsfolk, you can level up your Royal Virtues; there is plenty of activities to break the monotony of clearing dungeons. With BotW or TotK, which are true open-world games, absolutely massive in scale, there is so much exploration that is constantly surprising and exciting that you can go in whatever direction and just stumble upon an adventure — which is not necessarily fighting someone. In the last chapter of Clair Obscur you fight incessantly, and when you go to camp trying to do something else: there is nothing. Your companions' dialogues looped 10 hours ago, and their personal quests took an hour to complete.
Eventually I did all I wanted to do: I explored all areas, fought all the optional bosses that were of interest to me, levelled up significantly and upgraded all the weapons my party was using. I took my builds pretty seriously because if the optional stuff is this high-level, then the final boss must be even harder, right?
I ventured towards the last quest marker, and as is often the case, before reaching the boss I had to traverse the final area, fight some more enemies while listening to an absolutely incredible soundtrack. I always take final quests very seriously: I am excited and anxious at the same time, my heart is racing, I am fully immersed into the story that is about to come to an end.
However, I immediately felt that something was off. All fights were one-button fights. The enemies could not deal a single point of damage to me because they simply did not live long enough to play their turn. I was plowing through them feeling no resistance. This was a low-level area; all the loot was low-level loot. There wasn't a single catalyst for upgrading my weapons to the maximum level — only mids. Oh no, I thought to myself. Remember how upon finishing the main game I struggled to find a level-appropriate area to become stronger? Well, I found it. The final boss area was the missing piece. It is balanced to you level 40, or whatever level you are upon finishing the main game. I am level 80-something.
Oh no.
There are many things that I might dislike in a videogame, but I don't think anything tops killing the final boss in one hit. I consider the final encounter of any game its ultimate highlight, and bringing the final boss down with one press of a button gives me no satisfaction at all and significantly sours my overall impression of the game.
Admittedly, I could have remedied some of that by doing what many people I later watched did: capping myself back to 9999 damage. Well, I didn't. The boss was annihilated immediately, and the ending sequence began. Then the credits, and the game was done.
It is still perplexing to me to this day. Clearly, I was supposed to go to the final boss immediately after finishing the main game. But what about the exploration and the open world? When was I supposed to be doing all that? To be clear, there is no post-endgame freedom 'and now we go on more adventures'. The game ends, and that's it. The decision to balance the final area and the final boss to mid-level you who just gained the ability to finally explore the world with zero subsequent scaling is beyond bizarre to me. To be fair, in Metaphor the last branch of side quests before the final boss is also technically more challenging than the final boss themselves, and you do arrive at the showdown being about 10 levels higher than them, but it is still a challenging and interesting fight that does not just rely on numbers. Since in Clair Obscur it is often the case that the longer the bossfight goes on, the more story-relevant dialogue you get, I had to go on Youtube and watch the final bossfight from someone else because for me it barely happened.
All in all, despite the fact that there were things that I absolutely loved in Clair Obscur, it has become yet another reminder of why I never write about games I haven't completed, and why the first chapter of a long game being perfection means absolutely nothing. All big games I ended up disliking had stellar first chapters. Whenever I start a big RPG, or a JRPG that is dozens, or a hundred hours long, I temper my expectations because if the game cannot maintain this momentum and deliver a consistently good experience from the start to the end, the first 10-12 hours being amazing are completely meaningless. The first chapter of Clair Obscur is excellent. It's simply superb. But does it matter if the game starts crumbling the further it goes, and the last 15 hours are just silent fighting with the camp where no one has enough dialogue to accommodate the length of the adventure? Does it matter if the final encounter is effectively nullified by the balance problems? Many of my friends told me that they also felt these shortcoming while playing, but they were so invested into the story that these downsides sort of paled in comparison with the emotional roller coaster the game puts you through. Oh, I cried a lot too, but it doesn't make me forget hours of getting destroyed by enemies with hundreds of thousands and millions of HP because the game's pacing has gommaged.
I think, above all, Clair Obscur would have benefited from being shorter and also being open-area or entirely linear. While the experience is curated and the game leads you, perfectly playing the notes of exploration, fighting, cutscenes, amazing discoveries and heartfelt conversation, it is nothing short of magnificent. Letting go of the player's hand while having no devices for them to navigate the open world, which is stunning on the outside, but fairly desolate within, is its biggest flaw. Expedition 33 is a deeply flawed magnificence.
But, I believe, magnificence nonetheless.
Clair Obscur has been a hit — and, I should hope, a big inspiration for those who come after. It is an incredible achievement for a young studio's first project, and even though I didn't enjoy the game as much as I hoped I would, I will wait with bated breath for what comes next.
Let me know if you've played Clair Obscur and what you liked and disliked about it. Please be careful not to spoil anything for those who are yet to play it.
As usual, stay tuned here and on the Lair's YouTube channel not to miss out on anything.
Thank you very much for your time. Take care.
